Fleeced (10 page)

XI

N
IGHT AT THE
M
USEUM

Groan
…

          
puff
…

                        
sigh
…

For those of you who’ve never shared your bedroom with half a ton of ram, these are the sort of sounds it makes when he’s too excited to sleep.

Snort
…

            
scrunch
(of half a biscuit discovered
                                  in the bedding)…

                                            “
Hellooo…?
”

Aries tried to sleep. He really did. But every time he closed his eyelids, images of lambs bounced across them, each carrying letters: an ‘N’, an ‘E’, an ‘A’ and an ‘R’ in their fleecy tails, gambolling over grass like woolly ballerinas, spelling the word out over and over again.

“Near!” announced Aries, clattering to his hooves and flinging off his share of the blanket. “Near!”
he said to the odd-shaped parcels above his head, half-lit by the dim corridor lights spilling through the glass in the door. “Near!” he told the stuffed lizard whose glass eyes glinted at him from the gloom.

Then he trotted over to Alex and leaned down close to the boy’s ear. “Alex,” he whispered. “Are you asleep?”

“Yes,” said Alex.

That was a nuisance, thought Aries and clopped back to face the wall. Why didn’t Alex understand how difficult it was to sleep, knowing that Aries’ fleece was

And
close
added a little voice in his brain, not to mention proximate, not too far away, within a short distance, in the vicinity and quite possibly within spitting distance. His blood raced like fireflies, his heart pumped like a yearling.

“Near!” Aries announced to the darkened ceiling. He regarded the door and took a step closer to it. After all, as he would quickly have pointed out, he didn’t come back to Earth to practise camping in the British Museum under a rather scratchy – and for all he knew rather flea-bitten – old blanket.

He looked back and licked Alex’s ear.

“Get off!” Alex batted him away. “It’s the middle of the night!”

“Near!” said Aries in a low voice.

“What?” muttered Alex, noticing the rather mad-looking glint in Aries’ eyes. “Not again!”

Aries nodded wildly. “I’m going to look for it!”

“Now?” exclaimed Alex. He drew his knees up to his chin and wrapped his arms around them. “What a brilliant idea! I mean, I wonder why I didn’t think of it? What with no talking Scroll, no idea where to start looking and, oh, the little matter of being in the middle of a museum in modern London full of guards who could arrest us and throw us into jail at any moment…”

“But apart from that?” Aries persisted.

Alex groaned and lay back down on the bed, pulling the blanket over his head.

Back in her tiny bedroom in Camden, Rose sat cross-legged on her bed, tapping away on her computer and humming along happily to her latest Hazel Praline CD.

And the reason she was so happy?

Because she’d discovered how to fix the Scroll.

As in
really
fix it.

Racking her brain for a way to fix the parchment, Rose had remembered the odd little map scrawled on its reverse side. She hadn’t paid much attention to
it at the time but this evening it reminded her of last summer’s holiday hotspot: the Royal Geographic Society, where she and her mother had spent many happy hours (well, her mother, anyway, Rose having had no choice as usual) in the Cartography Laboratory. Cartography is a fancy word for maps, in case you’re wondering, and the lab was rather like a hospital for crumbly old ones.

The lab’s computers could scan in moth-eaten old maps, tattered with holes and rips, and work out where the missing contours, coastlines and paths would once have gone. Other machines analysed the age and density of the original scraps and, more importantly, gave directions to where, in the lab’s library, the same type of paper might be found to patch the maps perfectly. Since the lab stored thousands of types of paper Rose was confident they’d have a much closer match for the Scroll. Then all they had to do was feed it into the machine to produce perfect copies of all the missing pieces. With the right sort of paper, Rose reasoned, the Scroll would practically be back to normal and much more likely to give sensible answers to Aries’ questions about the fleece.

And to her own.

Meanwhile, up on the top floor of the British Museum, Aries shuffled through the deserted Egyptian Rooms, ducking the security beams and weaving between the red-eyed motion sensors. He’d already seen the cracked teapots of ancient China, the seal-fur underpants of the Viking invaders and a ghastly display of Amazonian shrunken heads with lolly-out tongues. Now he picked his way through cabinets stuffed with statues of blue hippos and green crocodiles and row upon row of mummification tools all silvery in the moonlight. He paused to peer at a line of wooden stobbers and hoikers for hooking out brains and shuddered before turning to yet another painted sarcophagus.

“Great Aken Poo Poo,” he muttered, staring at the mummy case, its big potato nose glinting in the moonlight. “Know you the way to the fleece?”

The mummy case remained silent. Just as well, I suppose, since if it had sprung open and a bandaged figure had leaped out, there’d have been a brand new exhibit of Greek-Ram-Poo-Poo on the floor and the curators would not have liked that. Nor the cleaners.

Aries sighed and looked around at the mummy’s rigid face. Of course it was wonderful knowing that the fleece was near, it was the best news he’d had in centuries, but really, what the Scroll had said
was very puzzling. And not particularly helpful when you had three enormous floors to search, all with rooms the size of tennis courts and brimming with cabinets, cupboards and shadows.

Wearily, he meandered up to a nearby sign, which read:

Aries walked up to the first dummy and considered it. With its bulging belly, beard and silk bloomers it was a funny looking wife, he decided, even allowing for the whims of fashion. Then he read the notice beside it, which said:

He might have smiled but for the frustration he felt. His hooves ached. His back ached. Worse, his heart ached because he had to admit to himself that Alex had been right: it would have been more sensible just to wait for Rose to repair the Scroll.

Shrugging, he glanced along the dresses on display. Beneath the night-lights their luxurious
fabrics glowed. Extravagant damson and cream silks, swathes of emerald velvet and golden damask, braided with ribbons, their bodices picked out with tiny, glimmering seed pearls.

Except for the last one.

Intrigued, Aries clopped closer. This dress was made from heavy grey muslin, the colour of rain clouds. Pooling heavily around the dummy’s feet, it was plainer by far than the others, save for a glittering row of gold stitches around its square neckline.

Sighing, Aries sank down, feeling a wave of tiredness wash over him. Laying his muzzle on the soft fabric, he muttered contentedly and read the card by the dummy’s feet:

Execution
, thought Aries sleepily, feeling his worries disappear as he sank into a doze. Taking a deep breath he snuggled deeper into the dress’s skirts, paddling his hooves into its soft folds until
it slid from the dummy’s shoulders and covered him completely. Then, cosy and warm, he fell into a deep sleep.

XII

E
ARTH
, W
IND
AND
I
RE

Compared to Anne Boleyn, earthworms live rather ordinary lives.

Day after day spent mooching and mulching through soil, their big moment comes when they poke their head into the sunshine and become a blackbird’s breakfast. Except that tonight one London worm community was having an altogether livelier time than usual.

This community of worms lived in Regent’s Park, tucked in a bed of yellow Californian roses, and up until a few minutes ago their lives had been simple and, well, wormy. But now, as Big Ben struck twelve, their soil began to quiver strangely. And thrum. With a good deal of shaking and groaning thrown in. Clay clods wobbled up, roots flapped, gravel rained down, crushing the wormholes and twirling the worms to make them look like marshmallow twists, but brown grey instead of pink and yellow.

Squirming to escape and stampeded by beetles and spiders scuttling past in a tussle of legs, the worms wriggled for the surface, trying to escape the earthquake, unaware that there was no earthquake. Simply a sorceress, chanting and stamping in the flower bed.

Draped in a moss-green velvet robe with Hex wrapped around her neck like a lively silvery scarf, Medea twirled in the rose trees, her fists above her head, flattening the earth over what she’d planted.

Dragons’ teeth.

Remember how the ones planted on Kolkis had sprung up into Skeleton Soldiers? The ones she’d planted tonight were even meaner – a monster medley, if you like.

Since landing at Heathrow, Medea had worked fast, racing to her London home, a swanky
three-storey
mansion in Belgravia, snatching her favourite magic ingredients from the cellar and
click-
click-clacking
across the park in her high heels to this particularly private spot. Sorceresses, you see, move faster at night, like spiders. This is because there are fewer people around to ask them why they are dancing in the flower beds, damaging the flowers and wearing a venomous snake around their necks, which, whatever you might have heard about
Londoners, is still considered unusual behaviour.

Breathing in the spicy scent of the roses, she tried to block out the memory of the stench in the cellar. And the squealing. We’ll come to what she kept down there later on, but for now, let’s just say it wasn’t the usual old suitcases and a broken vacuum cleaner you’d expect.

Hex coiled round and looked into her eyes. “Can we go home now?” he hissed, thinking of how flying had rather dried his scales and he’d just love a wriggly dip in the swimming pool in Medea’s garden.

“Of course not, scale-brain!”

Medea’s eyes glittered like broken glass as, kneeling down, she squelched soil between her fingers, scooped up two fistfuls and held them to the sky.

Fanning out her long fingers over her head, the soil drizzled down, showering over her shoulders and bouncing off Hex’s head.

Three thumps rang out of the earth into the stillness and Medea stood up, her face a cold mask of pleasure. Turning, she stamped her feet into the earth, pounding a tattoo against the soil, facing the sky.

It was a good job that the park keeper wasn’t around to see her, because I can tell you he wouldn’t have taken kindly to that sort of behaviour in his most exotic roses. Nor would he have liked the crash of thunder and sudden wind that whipped across the park, twisting the rose bushes on their stalks and sending every rose petal into the air as she began to spin. Her skirt snagged in the thorns as she turned, muttering darkly under her breath, her face tilted to the moon, when suddenly she stopped and threw her arms up, twisting her hands, one over the other, as though winding in an invisible rope. Magic, as you might not know, needs energy and is much more like an aerobics class than any
tapsy-wapsying
of wands. Dark and primitive, it needs power and without lots of arm waving and leaping about, it’s just so many dark words lost on the air.

A
whooshing
sound erupted from the soil and Medea froze, staring down, her eyes wide and gleaming like broken glass, as three holes zigzagged open around her feet. Earth poured into them like
muddy waterfalls and anyone close enough would have seen the soil crumbling onto the heads and shoulders of three curiously misshapen figures below.

Kneeling at the edge of the nearest hole, Medea peered down, whispering:

Surprised?

I expect you were rather taken aback at how excited Medea was by the television footage at the café too?

I mean you just don’t expect a sorceress to leap on a plane, dive into some London rose bushes at midnight and ask for help in tracking down a ram, do you? And much as I’d like to reassure you that it was just for old time’s sake, I’m afraid you’re right to be worried.

“Can I have a look?” hissed Hex, his fangs glinting silver in the moonlight.

Medea glared at him.

“I need to know what’sss going on, don’t I?” the
snake persisted, lowering himself towards the soil, squinting. “After all, you want a capable familiar, don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Medea coldly. “In fact, I’m thinking of getting one. You know, a black panther, maybe, or a Bolivian bird-eating spider.”

She gripped Hex’s throat and clicked her fingers above his head. A scatter of black stars rained down over his skin, dusting his scales and jerking him as rigid as a broomstick. He gulped, flicking his green eyes to look at her just as she tossed him up into the air, caught him and jammed him, snout first, down into the earth.

“Capable, indeed,” she muttered, dusting the soil off her hands.

Then she paused, listening to the new sounds mingling beneath her feet: the throb of three hearts, an unfurling of knifelike feathers, a scrabbling of fingers, a throaty braying laugh.